About
It started as an insult.
WHALE is a magazine and a community for women who are tired of being addressed as a problem to be solved.
The name was chosen deliberately. It is the word people reach for when they want a woman to feel small. We took it and put it on the masthead, set in the largest type we had.
WHALE was founded by Nina Nolan, who also writes here.
What we publish is journalism: reported, edited, and attributed. Style, bodies, sex and intimacy, health, work, life, and first-person writing in Voices. What we do not publish is a diet, a cleanse, a before-and-after, or a piece of health advice that would not survive contact with the evidence.
The community
Alongside the magazine there are five rooms where members talk to each other. There are no follower counts, no likes and no ranking. Threads are shown in the order people wrote them.
Any post can be made anonymously. That is not a nickname sitting over your real name: when you post anonymously WHALE does not keep your identity anywhere another member — or a moderator — can reach it. You can still find and edit your own anonymous posts, because the lookup that makes that possible only ever returns your own.
Community guidelines
- Adults only. Community accounts are for people aged 18 and over.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Disagreement is welcome here. Contempt is not.
- No diet talk, no numbers. No weights, no calorie counts, no goal figures. This is the one rule with no exceptions, because for some readers those numbers are not neutral information.
- Do not give medical instructions. Share what happened to you. Do not tell somebody else what to take or what to stop taking.
- What is written here stays here. Do not screenshot a member’s post out of this community, anonymous or not.
- Say when someone is at risk. If a post worries you, report it and choose Someone may be at risk. A person will read it.
How moderation works
Moderators can hide and remove posts and must write a reason for each action. Every action is recorded with their name against it, and so is every action that gets refused. Moderators cannot see who wrote an anonymous post; there is no view in the system that would tell them.
Getting in touch
For editorial matters, corrections, or anything about your account, write to hello@thisiswhale.com.